We Had It So Good Read online

  Off the ship sailed, backing out from Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty receding, Ellis Island receding behind him, and in that high-tide moment, it was all over, all was done with America.

  All at Sea

  There he stands, high on the promenade deck in various shades of gray, the gray sea and gray sky behind him. A gray figure has a big gray arm around Stephen’s narrow gray shoulders. He is laughing with his gray lips. Nearly twenty-five years go past before this big gray boy suddenly swims into shockingly familiar vivid focus, in color: stunning evidence, to Stephen’s two children, that not everything your parents told you was a series of evasive lies. Even if those lies were related with honorable intentions by adults trying to protect not just the innocence of their kids, but their own privacy. To which those kids had only recently understood they were entitled.

  The ship was sumptuous. In the first-class ballroom, walls of pale gold leaf shone against etched glass panels of underwater life. There were dining rooms, movie theaters, a kids’ playroom, cocktail bars, stages and libraries. If you peeled off the side of the ship at sunset, you would see an uncurtained city, cells of light, each stateroom and cabin rising up above the turbines until they reached the twin funnels, patriotically painted red, white and blue, exhaling the ship’s breath with a throaty cry.

  His own tiny cabin was deep below the surface. Heating pipes ran above his head, so he could not sit up to read even if he had wanted to. At night he was so exhausted he sometimes lay down fully clothed and fell asleep, and in his dreams he heard the water outside rushing hard against the steel.

  The uniform he remembered vividly: a white Prince Edward jacket and maroon pants with a stripe running down the side. The duties were to be on the go. To answer the call of the bell.

  “In the middle of the deck,” he told Max and Marianne, “there was a little room, where we all sat, the bellboys, the cabin stewards and stewardesses. You had a board called an enunciator with numbers on it and when the light went on, up you got. Basically, I was an errand runner. If a passenger wanted a drink in his stateroom, the drink got mixed in the cocktail bar, and I had to run up there to get it, and deliver it. I brought them their dry cleaning, picked up their shoes to shine and took messages to other passengers. Of course, it was absolutely against the rules to mix with them, but quite a few were families with young daughters our own age and they were looking for shipboard romance. We college kids were tacitly understood to supply that, so at night you got changed, went up to the passenger decks and tried to find girls.”

  He is busy all day long, running through gangways in his bellboy’s suit, stained with coffee spills and his own underarm sweat. He lies at night in the ship’s inner stomach, as if he were Jonah swallowed up by the great leviathan while the glamour and romance of the last oceangoing transatlantic cruise liners glitters unseen above his slumbering head. He has witnessed with his own eyes the white tablecloths in first class, the silverware radiating in pairs of multiplying forks and knives and three kinds of spoon. Soup sways in bowls, jellies shiver, decorated with green leaves of candied angelica. The women’s arms and shoulders are creamily bared under the lights and he notices, ascending the stairs above him, a host of men’s patent leather shoes like the black keys of a piano, tapping in time.

  Movie stars and statesmen sailed to Europe on this ship, but in tourist class he ran into another Rhodes Scholar en route to Oxford. His new friend was a big, blond Southern boy with a veneer of East Coast sophistication, a Georgetown graduate who just had to turn to a girl and smile and she was all goose bumps. You could not imitate what he did, it was nothing to do with what he said to a girl, the pickup phrases. Stephen had tried that and it never worked. The secret was probably hormonal. The boy radiated a chemical appeal, a cocktail of this and that secreted by his skin.

  The second night out the boy picked up a girl in the novelty shop buying little shreds of Japanese paper which you floated in a glass of plain tap water and overnight turned into flowers. She was in first class with all its wondrous amenities, traveling with her parents, and he talked her into inviting him to dinner in the first-class dining room. It wasn’t the girl he was interested in, he confided to Stephen, but how they traveled up there. He was absorbing how others live, he was learning how to move confidently among the rich, studying their habits. Later, they climbed down into the bowels of the ship, to join Stephen in his cabin, carrying a selection of little cakes called petits fours wrapped up in a white linen napkin.

  They bit into the marzipan shapes. The girl was enwrapped in that big arm. They talked about the war, which they were each just as anxious to duck out of, the girl equally emphatic about its criminality. They discussed Oxford University, a place that seemed as unreal as a riverside hamlet in Huckleberry Finn, an old story from the past, but which was the boys’ immediate future, they would be there in two days’ time, among the English. Despite the war, to be a Rhodes Scholar was to be an emissary of America. Whatever you thought of your country, you were a walking flag, they all agreed on that.

  The next day the ship landed at Southampton, Stephen slipping away from the crew. It was a serious offense to jump ship, the government could send agents to come and get you, but his rabbi would take care of it. College kids jumped ship all the time.

  “And so,” he told Marianne and Max, “I became the first American in history ever to reenter Europe as a wetback.”

  “How do you know you were the first?” Marianne said.

  “This lady is going to become a lawyer,” he told her mother. “We always needed a lawyer in the family.” There were no men of probity and judgment in either the Newman or the Salvídar families. Even he, Stephen, had turned out to be a moral failure in his own estimation.

  He arrives by train in Oxford, all spires assembled. Walks with his bag to his college and is taken to a room that looks to him like an exhibit from the Smithsonian. He is introduced to a man whom he finally understands to be his personal servant. He cannot understand a word he says. From the window he sees another old guy pushing along an iron contraption, which he later learns is to keep the surface of the grass surface level. Why? What is the point? Everything is a bright green blur, his eyes used to the monochromatic seascape of gray water, gray sky. After a few hours of visual adjustment, he can detect various shapes, one of which moves into focus on the lawn, a large tree with copper-colored leaves, a permanent feature of the view when he opens the drapes each morning. His name for it: that tree out there. He can identify one type of tree only, the palm, an example of which grew in his parents’ yard, an elderly specimen planted in the twenties.

  The tree outside his room was hundreds of years old. The garden was full of stuff with names, both Latin and English, which you were supposed to recognize and he didn’t. He had no idea that the qualification for being British was the naming of vegetation, of trees, flowers and types of landscape. What was the difference between a rill and a brook? Did anyone know? And why did it matter? Trees, in his opinion, came in two sizes, large and small. The smaller ones, he learned, were called shrubs or bushes. Same difference.

  Farther out, the river had three names: Thames, Cherwell, Isis. You took a boat out on it and propelled the thing along with a pole. Couldn’t you move quicker with a motor? And where was everyone going on these boats? What was the purpose of these aimless journeys, fingers drifting through the water, except to move girls in floral dresses around?

  Stephen felt that he had come from a country so brand-new that if you peeled off the layers of the present, you would only find more present. Here, the continuous uncovering of the past, history’s insistence on not getting out of the way, was depressing. It reminded you that soon you would be bones under the ground. One day you might be a fossil unearthed and on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

  These matters were discussed with his shipboard companion a few days after they arrived, meeting up again in a pub recommended by the college porter, a place of overpowering musty quaintness down a na
rrow alley opening up to a kind of medieval yard, with wooden tables and benches, overseen by impossibly ancient houses that looked like their jutting windows would fall out on the heads of the drinkers below. This was what the petits fours on board the SS United States had been preparing them for: really small things. They were much too big for Oxford, for staircases they could take two steps at a time, ceilings too low, rooms too cramped, and professors who lacked a certain zest. At his first meeting with his thesis advisor, Stephen came away with the desire to drink a glass of water, to wash away the taste of dust in his mouth. In the pub they tried a glass of ale and did not like it. Stephen smoked incessantly the supply of American cigarettes, his beloved Camels, which he had brought to fortify him in the old land. He felt himself to be in motion, swaying from side to side between Europe and America, but his buddy was studying international relations and international girls. Already, after only a few days in England, he felt competent to speak knowledgeably of the differences between them.

  Stephen, a late developer sexually, had had steady girlfriends throughout college; his tendency was toward monogamy because he found casual sex too awkward and time-consuming to organize. He had grown up amongst women and he liked to live with women, without complications. Apart from the girls in Naples, he had never had a one-night stand, it wasn’t in his nature; he was, he would later say, differently wired. That was him.

  At Oxford, unless you studied the same discipline or were in the same college, or a member of the various university societies or played sports, you didn’t interact. The shipboard companions went on to form their own inner circles, reverting to the lukewarm status of acquaintances, bound only by the shared memory of a voyage already half-forgotten and no longer important as the life of the university unfolded. For a term they still stopped and spoke for a few minutes when they passed each other on the street, then the words were reduced to a distant wave, the wave to a smile, the smile to a nod and they were strangers.

  Twenty-five years later, watching the TV news, Stephen shouted, “I know him! That’s Bill Clinton. We came over on the SS United States together, except he didn’t have a father who made him work his passage, he had a real cabin like I should have had and now the bastard’s going to become president.”

  The children stared at the screen.

  “Okay,” said Marianne, skeptically.

  “Listen, I’m telling you. He and a girl from first class came down to the crew’s quarters and we all squeezed in and ate petits fours together on my bunk.”

  For the two terms of Clinton’s presidency, Max would drily preface any mention of him with the words, “Bill Clinton, with whom my father, you know, once shared petits fours on a cruise ship.”

  The stories your parents tell you have many ellipses, Marianne explained to her younger brother. You cannot rely on them for the truth. Parents, by definition, are liars.

  The Froggy Day

  When, the morning after Stephen first slept with Andrea, he decided to make the solemn redheaded girl laugh by telling her about the time he had tried on Marilyn Monroe’s champagne mink. So she countered with the story of the froggy day.

  Once upon a time there was a froggy day.

  “What the hell is a froggy day?” he said.

  “Don’t you have fog in Los Angeles?”

  “Not much, smog, not fog. There’s fog in San Francisco.”

  “So you don’t know about froggy days.”

  “Nothing at all. What frogs?”

  “There are no real frogs.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, listen and I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  Andrea’s mother picked her up from her bed in her nightclothes and held her against the window to show her an all-white world, featureless and cold. Her father laid his hand on his daughter’s red curls, called her Mademoiselle Ginger Nut and went down the stairs to eat his breakfast. After he left for work, putting on his trilby with the interesting green and bronze feather in the band, her mother stood in the scullery and washed the porridge pot. The day before, clothes had been laundered and pressed through rollers, then pinned with wooden pegs to dry on the pulley in the kitchen’s warmth. Andrea, now dressed in corduroy trousers and a spotted blouse with a Peter Pan collar under an emerald green jersey knitted by her mother, a brown velvet ribbon pinned to her hair, did not look up.

  Before breakfast, held by the protective arm of her mother at the window, her father tousling her hair, sounds outside had seemed muffled. The usual garden birds, the sparrows, the blackbirds, the winter robins, had gone silent. The bare branches of the cherry tree had vanished, the fence was invisible. All she had seen was the single bird standing on the lawn, balancing on a repellent foot, black against the fog’s whiteness.

  The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac and beyond its garden, after the termination of the school playing fields, London finally ended; they were already in the lower reaches of Hertfordshire. “Over there, sweetie, is the north,” said Andrea’s mother, pointing a square-nailed finger to the horizon. “No more London.” The north. Darkness, land of crows. And she has no idea at all what London is, except it is a thing like parents, and your house, and your face in the mirror.

  After breakfast Andrea climbed the high stairs to find her bunny rabbit, which had been missing. “The fog is clearing,” her mother called up to her. Andrea, who was agile, could crawl up first onto the ottoman, then onto the window seat, standing unsteadily in her brown sandals on the velveteen cushions. Her mother was right, as mothers had to be. What colossal eruptions, should a mother be wrong.

  Outside the window everything had reappeared in its own form. A tree was a tree. The fence reared up. And behind it, the school playing field mistily present, on which an entire army of horrible birds had gathered, opened their mouths and made a huge raucous disturbing noise as if they were trying to tear down the house with their heavy beaks.

  She had thought, as far as it is possible at two and a half to think, that she was safe, high in the house, balanced on the blue cushions of the window seat, but the angry bird on the lawn with its disgusting scaly legs and primeval feet would soon be followed by the whole troupe, hopping into the house by the open back door, into the kitchen, taking the stairs in ungainly jumps, their wings balancing them, and into her bedroom, where a real bed had recently replaced her fenced and guarded cot. They would peck out her eyes and eat her tongue.

  “Crows,” her mother said, “just crows,” as an arm came from behind to steady her on the velvet cushion and stroke her hair, because the child was not aware that for nearly a minute she had been screaming.

  Rocked back and forth in her mother’s arms, she was taken downstairs into the warm kitchen and given a rich tea biscuit almost the size of her head which dissolved into soggy crumbs around her mouth. (A chocolate biscuit would result in an entire chocolate child, smeared in her hair and on her naked toes.)

  “We forgot Nunny,” her mother said, and picked up the damp beige rabbit that was lying on the floor under the table. “He’s all clean now.”

  Andrea watched her take Nunny and hang him up by the ears from the pulley. She dropped her biscuit.

  Upstairs she was found hiding under her bed with the dust balls. In the afternoon, she was taken to the doctor, who prescribed a bottle of tonic: colored water for nervous patients. Small glass animals stood in awkward attitudes on the surgery mantelpiece, warmed by a coal fire. On the bus coming home she fell asleep and dreamt of glass crows advancing across the golf links. “She screamed the bus down,” her mother said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She seems afraid of everything.”

  Next morning the weather is back to normal. At the end of the week, snow, which brings its own peculiarities. Two years later they moved to Cornwall with its mild climate, where she hoped there would be no crows, fog or executed rabbits.

  “That is a very neurotic story,” Stephen said.

  “Don’t you like it?”

/>   “I don’t know, what happened next? Did you grow up being frightened of your own shadow?”

  “No. We moved away from London and went to Cornwall because my dad inherited some money and he did what he’d always wanted, left the wine trade and bought a hotel.”

  The family had gone there with such high hopes. “So long Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square,” they sang, as they drove west. Andrea was too young to understand what they were saying goodbye to, or what good-bye really meant. They were starting a new life, but what was a life? She thought deeply about things. She was always turning them over in her mind, so the question of why her doll Elizabeth had thick cold plastic skin and hers was warm and responded to the touch with indentations made her retreat to the cupboard under the stairs where the electricity meter lay in the darkness, ticking over, to pull Elizabeth’s head off and find out what was inside. Nothing. A hollow into which you could pour water.

  The various chambers of the hotel, its television room, card room, dining room, the reception desk with its leather-bound registration book, the maids’ cupboards, the garage of the chauffeur, who picked arriving guests up from the station in the old Daimler: they were a vast impersonal domain for a little girl.

  The family’s cramped flat was in the worst rooms, no one bothered to clean or make the beds, the air smelt of overnight, sweat, soiled underclothes scattered across the floor. The kitchen in which joints of beef swimming in fat and tepid gravy were unhygienically prepared by a chef who behaved like a warlord, in control, as her father came to understand he was not, of the entire battery of sharp knives, and the mallets used for tenderizing meat.

  The parents she had known in High Barnet, before her father’s dogged pursuit of the inheritance from his aunt Mabel in Winchester came off, became distant, harried creatures, forced to wear smiles which they tore from their faces once they had left the public stage, and her playtime was spent alone, ascending and descending in the Edwardian caged lift, the concertina doors opening and closing, the stairs with their faded rose carpets falling away or rising, until you reached the top floor and could go no farther. She climbed up an iron ladder in her plimsolled feet and came out onto the fake Gothic battlements where the estuary was an outstretched palm and the ships of the world, with Soviet, French, Taiwanese flags, sailing into harbor to load up with china clay and take it back across the oceans. The English Channel rippled and ridged beneath watery clouds. The salt tang of the sea. The car ferry clanking back and forth a few yards from shore to shore to the village on the other side, and the foot ferry, and at midnight, the night ferryman with his black cheroot, a burning coal in the darkness.